We all know that we should test everything before we do it on a production system.

Or should we? Well yes, you should, but sometimes there is no suitable test system (or even any test system, which seems to be becoming a more common problem) or the testing regime takes weeks and you need a fix right now.

So given that there really is a proper business reason why doing the testing is expensive {in effort or time} or impossible, what can you do? I believe there is an alternative.

To be able to reduce or remove the need for proper testing you need to be absolutely sure the following three things are true, in order of importance:

Be able to monitor the live system for negative impact of your changes.

Have a proven and quick rollout.

Be confident that the chance of negative impact on your system is low likelihood and low impact.

Note that, in my opinion, the least important {yet still very important} consideration is that the change be almost certain to work and won’t cause too much grief if something unexpected happens. However, this seems to be the main concern when people are considering a “Quick Fix” on a production system. “Is it likely to go wrong? Is it going to matter if it does not help?”. At this point all eyes tend to swivel to the DBA or the Lead Developer who has to go on what I call DBA Instinct. Given your experience to date and what you know about how the database works, give it your best guess.

The problem with DBA Instinct is that if you are not very experienced you are unlikely to get it right. If you are very experienced, most of that experience was on earlier version of Oracle and you probably do little hands-on work now as you are a manger. So you are still likely unlikely to get it right🙂

So, I argue that point 1 (spotting things going wrong) and 2 (Getting back to where you started) are most important.

Let us take the classic example of just adding an index as our untested change (as we have no system capable of generating a realistic workload and thus the impact across the board).

3) Most of us would agree that adding an index is easy and the impact is low and the chance of plans going terribly slow by using the new index unsuitably are low…

2) Rollback is relatively simple, you drop the index again. Question, can you just drop an index on a table if a SQL statement is in-flight and using that index? You know, a SQL statement that the CBO has decided is going to be useful and, despite your DBA Instinct that nothing is likely to go wrong, now takes 20 seconds to run rather than 0.2 seconds. And it is being run all the time on your OLTP system so now there is no time when there are not 2 or 3 queries in flight.

3) Verifying impact. This point is vital and can be tricky. You can just rely on staring at your monitoring tool and hoping any serious impact shows up so you can catch it and do something about it. Or people ring up and complain. That would not be so good, you have impacted the business.

I would pull out code from the SGA that is referencing the table to be indexed before you start (I’ll stick a bit of code at the bottom for doing this). If the list is not too large, you can do the same check after the code has gone in and compare changes to buffer gets and disk reads per execution.

A more targeted check is to pull out of v$SQL_PLAN anything that starts using the new index and check to make sure it is not now a problem.

A second example, I want to gather system statistics as I am sure the system does not appreciate how blindingly fast my disks are for multi block reads.

3) Impact? Well, I would suggest the potential impact is wide and across the board, else why do it?

2) Rollback? Delete the system statistics. What happens when you delete the system statistics? Are they all set to null? Are the defaults put back in place? Could I use DBMS_STATS.RESTORE_SYSTEM_STATS? What is the impact of any of them? {RESTORE appears to work reliably and, if you delete the system stats, you get the “out of the box” values again, which could be very different to what you had before your spur-of-the-moment gather}

1) How to assess negative impact? You are going to have to monitor the whole system and hope to pick up any code that starts running slowly before it impacts the business too much.

I would probably add the index but I would need to do at least some testing and proof of rollback before I gather system statistics. And I would only do so without proper testing if said proper testing was impossible due to a lack of test systems.

So, I do think you can implement changes without testing or with reduced testing, but it is not always the easy option.

I also think it is a valid (and often quicker, in terms of elapsed time) way of changing the productions system without going through full unit/integration/regression/NFR testing.

Now you just need to persuade the Change Advisory Board that it is OK to do the change. Good luck🙂